Summary

Although I'd love to tell you that this hour provided a comprehensive introduction to XSL-FO, the truth is that this lesson really only served as a bare bones introduction to XSL-FO. This is because XSL-FO is one of the most detailed XML technologies you are likely to encounter, and therefore requires much more than an hour of your time to truly get to know well. Having said that, this lesson did provide a serviceable introduction to XSL-FO, including the basics of coding XSL-FO documents and converting them to PDF using a handy little tool called FOP. You didn't see the specifics of how to transform a raw XML document to XSL-FO using XSLT but you have the skills to carry out such a transformation based on earlier lessons in the book. If you find yourself intrigued by the possibilities of using XSL-FO to carefully format XML data for print, I encourage you to further explore XSL-FO on your own. A good place to start is the Wikipedia entry for XSL-FO, which includes several useful links to other XSL-FO resources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL-FO.